Well, only goes to show how different everyone's experiences are. I guess I've had the opposite one: Node+CommonJS was something I was extremely comfortable with.
The slow adoption of ESM by Node, with many compatibility missteps, the thousand papercuts around TS, the way frontend-centric toolchains kinda-sorta paper over the whole thing, letting it fester, and the way people have been acting like things are ready for primetime for over a decade while diligently testing them in production, all of that came later. To the point of having me wondering how did people work with TypeScript before ~5.4 - though evidently they did, and had few if any of the same complaints!
Baffling but IIWII. Anyway, only this year I discovered a pure `tsx` + ESM workflow had become viable OOTB, to no little surprise. I perceive that as the toolchain becoming unfucked just as randomly as it became fucked when Node 16 did what it did. Not that it didn't take a couple years for TS to "invent" the right compiler flags that it took to tell it to stay out of the runtime's way, too.
So a good year overall. Hope they don't break it again because when they do it's an uphill struggle to convince them that they have.
The slow adoption of ESM by Node, with many compatibility missteps, the thousand papercuts around TS, the way frontend-centric toolchains kinda-sorta paper over the whole thing, letting it fester, and the way people have been acting like things are ready for primetime for over a decade while diligently testing them in production, all of that came later. To the point of having me wondering how did people work with TypeScript before ~5.4 - though evidently they did, and had few if any of the same complaints!
Baffling but IIWII. Anyway, only this year I discovered a pure `tsx` + ESM workflow had become viable OOTB, to no little surprise. I perceive that as the toolchain becoming unfucked just as randomly as it became fucked when Node 16 did what it did. Not that it didn't take a couple years for TS to "invent" the right compiler flags that it took to tell it to stay out of the runtime's way, too.
So a good year overall. Hope they don't break it again because when they do it's an uphill struggle to convince them that they have.